PROCLAMATION!
1. The town of Bouillon will pay a War Levy of 500,000 francs.
2. Belgian or French soldiers must be handed over as Prisoners of War before 4 P.M. Citizens failing to obey this order will be sentenced to Penal Servitude for Life in Germany. Every soldier found after that hour will be Shot.
3. Arms, powder, dynamite must be handed over before 4 P.M. Penalty, to be Shot.
4. Interdiction to be out in the streets During the Hours of Darkness. All houses must be completely Open and Lighted. Groups of more than Five persons are Strictly Forbidden.
5. Citizens must salute every German officer with respect. Failing this, the officer is entitled to extort it by Any Means in his Power.
6. If any Hostile Action is attempted the town will be Burnt Down and a Third of the Male Population will be Shot; without distinction of persons, the innocent will suffer with the guilty. The people of Bouillon must understand that there is no crime greater or more terrible than to endanger the existence of the town and its inhabitants by hostile action against the German army.
The under-mentioned have been taken as Hostages for the good behavior of the town.
The Commander of Division.
Followed a list of forty names, including both the priests. Fined, pillaged, terrorized, Bouillon yet thought itself lucky when the news came in from the country.
From Rochehaut no one had escaped; the warning did not come in time. Uhlans rode into the village on Monday afternoon and calmly took possession. Rochehaut was cringingly terrified, slavishly obedient. Not a dog could lift his tongue against the invaders without being zealously throttled; and when Madame Mercier's fat sow got in the way of the colonel, madame bundled out after her right under the horse's hoofs, to save, not her pig, but the dignity of a German officer. Alas! in spite of all, the colonel took a billet de parterre on the nearest dung-hill. He got up swearing, and for one awful moment Rochehaut trembled; but he went into the Petit Caporal to change, and Rochehaut breathed again, and went to pick up madame. That peril was averted.
For two days nothing happened, and the villagers crept out of their shuttered houses, and began timidly to go about their work of getting in the harvest. On the third morning, Thursday, 28th August, a poacher in the woods near the river let off his gun at a rabbit. He did not hit, and he was a Botassart man; but Rochehaut was the nearest village, and Rochehaut was held responsible. Moreover, that morning a patrol of Uhlans had gone out, to come back with ten empty saddles. French cavalry had laid an ambush for them in the woods near Vresse. Somebody must have given information to those French cavalry. It was necessary to make an example.
As a preliminary, a cordon was drawn round the village, and the people were collected in the square. Of the men, some thirty of the youngest were marked off for deportation to Germany, where they might be made use of for gathering in the harvest of the Fatherland; the remaining twenty found an end to their troubles in a trench under the churchyard wall. The women and children, who had been confined in the church during the fusillade, were let out to dig the general grave, and then suffered to go—not to their homes, however, for these were condemned. "They wandered in deserts and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the rocks, being destitute, afflicted, tormented." Poor old Madame Mercier, whose leg had got broken in her struggles with the colonel's horse, had been overlooked in the general confusion and left behind in her cottage. She could not get downstairs, but she dragged herself to the window and shrieked for help to the soldiers who were setting fire to her kitchen. The colonel, riding down the street, was annoyed by her cries; he looked up, and recognized the frightened old face. "One of you stop that old woman's noise!" he shouted. After all, why not? It was her own fault; why had she not obeyed orders, and gone to the church with the rest? "Es ist unsere Pflicht," said the Uhlans.
It was Lettice's turn that afternoon to fetch the daily loaf from the Boulangerie Lapouse, opposite the church. Her path led over the hill past the crucifix, across the fields and through a corner of Gardiner's enchanted wood, which here ran down quite close to the village. She toiled along, as usual with her head in the clouds, but her dreams were broken and her steps stayed by a sudden burst of firing. She paused in the fringes of the wood.
All down the street men in gray were systematically spraying the houses with petrol; others were taking their choice of the furniture. The shops and cafés of the square were already in flames. The colonel sat his horse looking on. Suddenly a boy of fifteen bolted like a rabbit out of one of the blazing doorways and down the blazing street. He too had disobeyed orders. A laugh, a leveled rifle, and the poor little rabbit bounced into the air with a squeak like a mechanical doll, legs and arms jerking, and then went flat on the ground, its defeatured face in the midden. The flaxen poll became a crimson blob. Lettice saw that. Her first impulse was to rush forward and attack the murderers with her bare hands; the next sent her running blindly back through the woods by the way she had come. She was not frightened—it was far too vast a thing for personal fear; but she was sick with loathing, as at the sight of some monstrosity which ought never to have been allowed to see the sun.
The world never looked quite the same to Lettice after that day. Blind and deaf, her mind blasted bare of thought, she crossed the fields and scrambled down the orchard, and came round the corner of the house into the courtyard. There she was brought up with a cold hand at her heart. Several wagons were drawn up at the door; men in gray, that accursed field-gray which has been hated as no uniform before, were loading them under the direction of an officer. And Dorothea? Faint with foreboding, seeing crimson blobs in patches on the flags, Lettice groped towards the side door—and was met by Dorothea herself coming out, her face all pink and white with tears.
"Oh, Lettice, Lettice!" she said, "they're going to burn the house—they give us a quarter of an hour to turn out!"
Lettice put a hand on her arm, partly for support, partly to make sure of her reality; and by common consent they turned, as they stood in the doorway, to watch the lading of the carts. All went by clockwork. To one, the soldiers were bringing out the contents of Lettice's linen chest, her blankets, sheets, etc.; to another the furniture and plate. They packed like professional movers. There were tarpaulins ready to cover the carts when full.